Credit: ESO
Monday, 24 November 2025
Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have captured this eye-catching image of planetary nebula Abell 33. Created when an aging star blew off its outer layers, this beautiful blue bubble is, by chance, aligned with a foreground star and bears an uncanny resemblance to a diamond engagement ring. This cosmic gem is unusually symmetric, appearing to be almost perfectly circular on the sky.
Credit: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS
Tuesday, 25 November 2025
ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter keeps gathering information from its orbit around Mars to understand its ancient past and potential habitability. The spacecraft was cruising over the southern highlands of Terra Cimmeria, some 400 km above the Martian surface, when it recorded this composite of five vertical images on 21 January 2024. Towards the bottom is Mars; at the top, space.
The kaleidoscope of light and colour is composed of the highest resolution images of the atmosphere above the limb of Mars ever obtained. Mars’s limb is the curved edge of the planet, the apparent boundary where its surface meets space. Observing a planet's limb can reveal details about the hazy edge of its atmosphere.
The spacecraft was in the shadow of Mars, looking towards a veil of dust backlit by the setting sun. From this vantage point, the Colour and Stereo Surface Imaging System (CaSSIS) aboard could reveal fine layers of cloud and dust scattered throughout the atmosphere. The five images, each covering a 3.6 km-wide slice of the atmosphere, show tens of layers spanning altitudes from 15 to 55 km. Each slice pictured is 200 km apart from the others.
Credit: JAXA/Kimiya Yui
Wednesday, 26 November 2025
JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui captured this photo of southern Europe and the northwestern Mediterranean coast from the International Space Station as it orbited 261 miles above Earth on Aug. 30, 2025. At left, the Po Valley urban corridor in Italy shines with the metropolitan areas of Milan and Turin and their surrounding suburbs.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Thursday, 27 November 2025
NASA’s Europa Clipper captured this image of a starfield — and the planet Uranus — on Nov. 5, 2025, while experimenting with one of its two stellar reference units. These star-tracking cameras are used for maintaining spacecraft orientation. Within the camera’s field of view — representing 0.1% of the whole sky around the spacecraft — Uranus is visible as a larger dot near the left side of the image.
Credit: Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Science: Yinuo Han (Caltech), Ryan White (Macquarie University); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Friday, 28 November 2025
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has delivered a first-of-its-kind: a crisp mid-infrared image of a system of four serpentine spirals of dust, one expanding beyond the next in precisely the same pattern. (The fourth is almost transparent, at the edges of JWST's image.) Observations taken prior to JWST detected only one shell, and although outer shells were hypothesized, ground-based searches failed to uncover any. These shells were emitted over the last 700 years by two aging Wolf-Rayet stars in a system known as Apep, a nod to the Egyptian god of chaos.
JWST's image, combined with several years of data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, narrowed down how often the pair swing by one another: once every 190 years. Over each incredibly long orbit, they pass closely for 25 years and form dust.
JWST also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another in this system. The dust ejected by the two Wolf-Rayet stars is “slashed” by a third star, a massive supergiant, which carves holes into each expanding cloud of dust from its wider orbit. (All three stars are shown as a single bright point of light in Webb’s image.)
JWST's mid-infrared image shows four coiled shells of dust around a pair of Wolf-Rayet stars known as Apep for the first time. Previous observations by other telescopes showed only one. Webb's data also confirmed that there are three stars gravitationally bound to one another.
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